The Battle for Traffic: Organic SEO vs. Social Media&nbspMarketing

The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

SEO and SMM are like pizza and cheese: you can get one without the other, but, believe me, it isn’t worth it.

Nowadays SEO cannot be effective without well-executed content curation. And that’s where social media kicks in — it helps you unlock untapped potential. Compared to other marketing channels, social media benefits SEO in unexpected ways. It’s not surprising that SEO and SMM have slowly become closely intertwined activities that all businesses want to take advantage of. But how exactly can SEO and SMM work together? Do social media signals affect your site’s visibility in Google? I’ve been investigating this topic for quite a long time and here's what I’ve learned so far:

Social media signals don’t influence site rankings

SEO isn’t effective without harnessing social media channels

In this post, I want to highlight the following idea: When you share content on SMM channels you’re not only getting engagement, but also bringing visitors to your site. This in turn helps you boost your site’s visibility: SMM corresponds to SEO and indirectly influences website performance in Google. My analysis shows that SMM impacts SEO much more than you might think. The truth is that, paradoxically, organic channels bring more traffic to SMM-focused blogs than to SEO-focused ones.

Rival IQ - for analyzing the communities of these well-known resources

SimilarWeb - for figuring out from which channels the resources get their traffic.

Without further ado, let's begin our analysis!

How effectively do SMM blogs trigger user engagement?

First, I went to SimilarWeb to learn which sources drove traffic to these sites in order to determine “winners” and “losers.” I expected that social media-focused blogs would perform much better when it comes to SMM traffic compared to SEO blogs. It sounds reasonable that SMM blogs know better than others how to attract and build relevant communities on social media and then convert them into loyal readers.

Below you can find a graph that represents the distribution of SMM traffic across all the resources studied:

Data was collected with the help of SimilarWeb

The absolute winner is socialmediatoday.com with 2.6 times more visitors from social media channels compared to seroundtable.com, which follows it. It's also worth mentioning that the other two leaders are blogs that are not from the SMM niche: seroundtable.com (11.63 percent of traffic coming from SMM channels) and searchenginejournal.com (10.75 percent).

The top three sites that are leading in organic traffic are all SMM-focused blogs that get more visitors from organic results than social media sites. This data supports my assertion about the role of SMM in the SEO process that I mentioned in the first part of this article:

Blog.bufferapp.com, razorsocial.com, and socialmediaexaminer.com received 5 times more organic traffic compared to social media traffic. And the main reason is because users interact with content shared on social media channels.

From examining my own clients’ Twitter and Facebook analytics insights, it's clear that users are more likely to like or share content rather than click on it. To earn a sufficient number of visitors from social media sources, you need to keep a close eye on what kind of posts not only engage users, but also get clicks. And if your goal is to drive traffic, then you need to focus on writing engaging tweets that will make your followers want to click on them. At the very least, you have to make sure that you actually include a link in your post. Because — let’s face it — we've all forgotten to share a link in our tweet at least once.

Speaking of search marketing blogs in organic results, they’re also performing nearly the same as SMM blogs:

searchenginewatch.com – 55.27 percent;

searchenginejournal.com – 55.2 percent.

After learning how much traffic those blogs received from social media channels, I was quite keen on finding out exactly how they attract visitors. In particular, I was interested in whether the virality of content, as well as the engagement of particular SMM sites, influence the number of visitors these sites get from those traffic channels. Ideally, if users are actively sharing your content on Twitter, Facebook, etc., then it should bring users to your site. Due to the difficulty of collecting data, I was forced to narrow down the list of SMM sites and focus on analyzing how well content performs on Facebook and Twitter.

In order to measure the virality of the content on those blogs and the engagement these blogs receive on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, I took the following steps:

I took from SimilarWeb the number of visitors (i.e., traffic from Facebook and Twitter)

As we can see from the table above, SMM websites are leading not only in levels of engagement, but also in traffic. Therefore, websites that successfully build and share content also receive the highest volume of traffic.

However, it is important to have relevant, active users following your social accounts. And you can always evaluate them with the help of Rival IQ, which helps you measure your audience’s engagement. Yet engagement on its own is a very vague measurement, should you need to understand how much traffic you can receive from your social media accounts. For the next step of my research, I was interested in discovering how many interactions you need, on average, to get your followers to click a link.

Based on the numbers from the table above, I found out that, on average, for every 40 interactions, you will only get one click (in case of an SEO community). Despite the fact that SMM communities usually have more subscribers than SEO communities, it's even harder for SMM communities to get clicks: one click occurs for every 80 interactions on social media. Hence, the problem lies not in the small number of subscribers, but in the small number of active, relevant followers. Relevant users are those who are interested in your content and will click on your links and share them. My tip here is not to grow your audience via "follow-back" strategies; to drive traffic, you need to connect with people who are interested in your message, so that they can spread it further.

If content works so well for SMM blogs, then it should generate a good number of links. This brings us to my next questions: How many links do those sites generate, and who leads the competition?

How well do SEO blogs perform in organic results?

As you remember, at the very beginning of my research, I made the assumption that SEO blogs were more likely to receive referral traffic than SMM blogs. Also, I assumed that SEO blogs should also have a good backlink profile with a large number of authoritative links. It seems only logical to suppose that SEO blogs are outperforming SMM blogs in terms of SEO. To find out whether this is true, I used Ahrefs to check the backlink profiles of the sites from my sample. Ahrefs has an awesome feature called ‘Batch Analysis’ that allows you to pull backlink metrics for several individual URLs and easily compare them.

The screenshot below gives us a clear picture of the domains’ rankings and their number of backlinks:

Interestingly enough, searchengineland.com has gained the highest number of referring domains, and it has shown the highest rate of Facebook and Twitter engagement.

In terms of referral traffic, simplymeasured.com has the highest rate (17%) and is followed by two blogs from the search marketing niche: seroundtable.com (15%) and searchengineland.com (13%). However, all the analyzed sites receive relatively the same number of visitors from referring domains, because all of them are actively sharing content on SMM channels. With the help of this strategy they’re getting links and traffic.

After analyzing all this data, I concluded that social media helps you to get you content seen, which in turn can substantially increase your number of brand mentions on the Web. The better you promote your content across SMM channels, the more referring domains you will receive. The case of socialmediaexaminer.com supports my statement about the importance of social media channels in link building. As you remember, this blog is focused on SMM, but it has relatively the same number of backlinks as searchenginejournal.com and marketingland.com.

To check the relevance of my results, I decided to ask an expert’s opinion on the importance of harnessing social media as part of an overall SEO strategy. Kelsey Jones, executive editor of Search Engine Journal and Founder/CEO of StoryShout, was very kind to share her insights on how social media is powering searchenginejournal.com:

“At Search Engine Journal, we've seen a dramatic increase in social media referrals over the last year. Our largest referrer is Facebook, with Twitter right behind it. Because of that, we've been doing more with Facebook Live and looking at how we share and promote our content on Facebook and Twitter. The more attention and nurturing we've placed on our campaigns, the better.”

Conclusion

In this post, I wanted to shed some light on how leading digital marketing blogs focused on SMM and SEO niches attract visitors, and what traffic sources work best for them. It's quite logical to assume that blogs focused on search marketing should be getting significantly more organic traffic compared to blogs that write about SMM. Accordingly, SMM blogs should be receiving the majority of their visitors from social media channels, since social media marketing is their area of expertise. Yet, I found out that the situation is much more nuanced than that. Drawing on examples using these ten well-known SEO and SMM blogs, we can see that SMM-focused blogs perform better in organic search than SEO-focused blogs. The high levels of engagement SMM blogs receive from social media allow them to get more backlinks and referral traffic, which, in turn, helps them rank higher organically.

About Alex-T —

Alexandra Tachalova has worked in digital marketing for over six years. She is a digital marketing consultant, helping digital businesses to open new markets and boost sales. Alexandra is a frequent speaker, and Founder of online digital marketing event DigitalOlympus.net.

After having delivered this research, I wondered whether someone has ever faced a situation in which a site that is performing pretty well in Google and receiving a solid amount of organic traffic also has about the same number of visitors from SMM profiles. In order to get this traffic, does this site have a huge number of followers and a solid engagement rate?

I'm curious about that because my gut feeling tells me that there's should be no correlation in SMM between the number of followers vs, engagement, as well as the amount of traffic received. I have no data on hand to confirm that, but my expertise keeps telling me that clicks, engagement, and followers have nothing to do with each other.

I have a personal case a bit in reverse, I was very active in google plus (on facebook not so much, but also), my positions were always in the top 3 for the keywords: real estate + area or similars, but I neglected my google + one month and my positions in google started to get low. Being objectionable, it may be due to two things in my opinion:

1. My competitors are very active in SEO

2. That there is a direct or indirect relationship between the use of google plus and SEO

Well I think that if social networks influence the organic positioning. But in my case it is the other way around, all the small traffic that I have is through organic positioning and see that I share the publications in social networks. It is true that I am always more focused on SEO than Social Media, because I do all the paperwork.

Hi, SolaireAltea! Thank you for your question! The thing is that i can't really tell you whether there is a correlation between promoting yourself on Google+ and your SEO rankings, since I've never researched this question. But thank you so much for bringing my attention to this matter!

We actually had a not-so-great experience with one of the websites from your list. One of the most popular.We submitted a promoted post there, which at one point had more shares from various bots than it had views. So it's hard to measure the efficiency of that publication by looking at the impact it made in social networks.

Overall, we found that publishing a promotional post on one of the top resources in your niche is a good thing to have for various marketing and sales purposes, we had more profit from referring to that post when explaining what Serpstat is than we had from publishing the post.

I have a somewhat interesting feedback about it. My blog had times when it did received huge amounts of social media traffic. Sometimes from Facebook, other times Stumbleupon or Flipboard. But interestingly enough, that didn't seem to count for a boost in organic traffic, or followers. Which is kind of shocking for me, because I do expected viralibility to produce some SEO signals as well.

But still, I consider that I should focus on both SMM and SEO when it comes to traffic, and to try beautifully expand the both areas. :)

Hi, Cornel! Thank you for sharing your experience with us! That's an interesting case, indeed. Though I'm afraid I cannot give you any feedback, since there could be a lot of other reasons that lead to your situation. You always need to do a detailed analysis of the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, because there are a lot of small things that are needed to be taken into account. Best of luck with your efforts! And thank you for your comment!

Yes, Alexandra, you are right. It is hard to pinpoint exactly what is the factor here since I don't have that much data to run through. I am yet still a one-man show on my business, so when I will scale things up I can get a better feedback about it. Cheers :)

Great read. Strong, fact based analysis. However...I personally believe (although with out the hard document evidence) that social signals DO impact ranking, especially for content that isn't evergreen. Time sensitive content that is being circulated aggressively on Facebook and LinkedIn receives short term ranking benefits. Especially if there's a local/regional tie. Just sharing my experience...

Hey great post Alex, think there's been other write ups on Buzzsumo about the correlation of shares vs backlinks. Their results wasn't straight forward but the evergreen piece of content usually have high shares/engagements with some backlinks. Backlinks were achieved passively.

I know this because one of our clients priorities are traffic, organic traffic was secondary. So most of my campaigns for this was great controversial content pushed out via SM. If the mother site had enough weight to gain search traffic for it, I would go back in to the content to make some updates (onpage optimize).

The shares that they get at times are astronomical, they achieve that with only 3500 followers (and moving up as we speak) going up against these other big brands that have over 100K followers.

So I guess what I'm getting at is I agree with what you're saying. Should have strategies for SMM & SEO, both compliment each other.

jhines, thank you so much for your opinion and for sharing your experience! From one project to another, I have the same results: if you combine SEO and SMM, then you can expect awesome results. And your story is yet another proof

When it comes to how to start, we study keywords difficulty and which are the most appreciated contents for the people. Anyway, at least for us, most of the times that battle ends when SMM and SEO become allies :-)

Wow is all I can really say about this, because you would totally think the opposite. In reality what this does is come down to is the power of social shares in my opinion and the more you have can also help you organically rank.

Good analysis of traffic received by several leading SEO websites. However I noticed that Moz is left out. I have noticed during the course of my work that on an average for websites (across sectors) organic traffic is about 75% , direct traffic 15% to 20% and referral and social media account for 5% to 10%

For blogs that have a mailing list and very popular social media profiles with thousands of followers the figures could be substantially different.

Hi, Joseph! Thanks a lot for your suggestion and you're right, - there are limitations. But for the kind of analysis you proposed I would need to have access to those companies private info (e.g. the size of their mailing lists and etc.). In my case, I just used public data that is available to everyone. Also, as it was already mentioned by someone in the comments, there are a lot of bots. And if a social media profile of a company is popular, it doesn't necessarily mean it influences a number of organic traffic. In this case, I tried to choose profiles where engagement correlates with the number of followers.

As for Moz, I just didn't include it in the analysis. The thing is that to trace an average number you need to choose stable and neutral cases that are relatively the same. The popularity of Moz may have lead to skewed analysis, as it, probably, would show higher numbers and cause spikes in stats.

But I totally agree with you that newsletters play a vital role in the numbers behind clicks and shares.

Hi, SolaireAltea! I'm not sure I can give you an expert opinion on that. I've never focused my analysis on Google+. First of all, it's because I don't really use it in my campaigns. Maybe, I should give it a try, but right now I can't tell you anything that can be supported by numbers or by my experience. But since it's so topical, I guess I should take a look at how Google+ can influence SEO. Thank you!

Funny you mentioned Google plus, one of our client site for some reason wasn't getting their content indexed as quick as it should be. Once we'd established a G+ for that blog, their stories quickly was indexed within minutes. Go figure.

Hey, Betty! Thank you so much for your interesting question that provoked such a discussion! As I already mentioned, I cannot give you an expert opinion on that at this moment, since I've never done any research on this matter. But, judging by the comments, Google+ could be effective. Just try different social channels and check what works best for you. The thing is that it is also strongly depends on the industry you are in.

Alexandra, very interesting article. In it, you say "organic channels bring more traffic to SMM-focused blogs than to SEO-focused ones". But you show that for the most part SEO blogs have more referral traffic, and in some cases comparable organic traffic. Can you please explain? Also, your analysis is of SEO and SMM blogs. But how does this affect blogs for say a cruise line, e-commerce site, or some other business blog?

Thank you for your excellent question; I apologize for the delay in responding to it.

I would say that the referral traffic for SEO blogs works that way, because they were launched earlier than the SMM blogs, and people tend to link to them to SEO blogs more frequently. However, you should remember that referral and organic traffic are separate channels. I know a lot of examples examples where sites have no referral traffic and are performing at top positions in Google. Also, in order to say what's going on in other niches, you need to deliver additional research. In general, though, I would assume that in the e-commerce niche, you should see a solid amount of referral traffic since they have normally have a good range of partners.

I always appreciate reading well thought out pieces so thank you for putting this together! However, I do find it kind of weird you made this assumption:

"It's quite logical to assume that blogs focused on search marketing
should be getting significantly more organic traffic compared to blogs
that write about SMM. Accordingly, SMM blogs should be receiving the
majority of their visitors from social media channels, since social
media marketing is their area of expertise."

I don't think what they write about has zero association with the 'kind' of traffic they get? I can write about PPC all day, but focus my efforts purely on SEO as a marketing strategy to get organic traffic from people searching for keywords on the topic. However, it doesn't mean that most of my traffic should be coming from PPC?

The type of traffic that a blog gets is purely going to be based on their marketing strategy...nothing to do with the topic they write about.

Another good example is there are a ton of 'SEO providers/companies' whose websites don't rank at all because they don't care about that...they focus traffic efforts on PPC, email marketing, or SMM.

I'm a firm believer of practicing what you preach and therefore made sure my SEO website ranks Page 1 for my services, however, some of the biggest national SEO companies don't rank for squat.

Thanks for your comment! Actually, those blogs are not only writing about SEO/SMM; they're industry leaders started by a group of SEO/SMM experts. As all of those blogs were started by people who were mostly involved in SEO and SMM, they were focused on channels that these professionals know inside out. So, that's why I think my assumption makes sense.Talking about SEO provides, etc., you're right.

However, I would think twice about whether I want to deal with an SEO company that has zero presence on Google. :) In regards to big companies, I'm certain that they are able to prove the quality of their services by putting clients' logos, participating in industry events, and having awards. Otherwise, their rates should be close to Indian companies to show their competitive advantage to a client.

Hi Alexandra, thanks for this research. The impact of social media on organic rankings has always been a subject of discussions at our company. And your case study clears it out for me.

I have one question, not sure if you have the data for it, but still, what would be your opinion on this: does engagement on Google+ impact rankings more than Facebook, Twitter and other social media just because it's the product of Google? Like some say that creating a blog on Blogspot is considered more trusted and is easier to bring to top positions than one on, for example, Tumblr.

You article is very interesting Alexandra, but I noticed a flaw in your methodology. The SEO focused sites you analyzed are journalistic sites, but 3 of the social media blogs are commercial/promotional. Their content is excellent, but Buffer, Razor and Simply Measured publish blogs to promote a product. Wouldn't that change the sharing dynamic?

Thanks for your comment! However, the Buffer, Razor, and Simply Measured blogs are not purely focused on promoting a product or a company. They cover a broad range of topics and have more than promotional content, which is why we included them in the research.

I have an educational blog and the little traffic I have comes from social networks. Analyzing my own behavior in social networks, I rarely click on the link, I just read the headline. I think I still have a lot to learn

Hello Alexander, this is quite an interesting topic. And I completely agree with you. We must use all available tools in SEO and SMM, individually they do not fully show their capabilities. Thanks for the interesting article, and good luck

Hi, 18k! There used to be a tool called Topsy, but it was closed in 2015. And it was helpful. I would suggest to look at stats in SimilarWeb or in your Google Analytics. If you receive a substantial amount of traffic from Google+, - you'll see it among your main traffic sources. If you want to check social signals, you can try SharedCount or linkilike, though their data sometimes seems odd to me. I personally don't know a tool that can trace how Google+ on its own influences your ranking. Hope it helps

Well done Alexandra, you provide pretty information about organic traffic and social media activities but what about latest Google update "Penguin 4.0" and please tell that how can we build safe link marketing avoiding latest update for target website?

The jury is still out for me on whether social media signals influence rankings.

Regardless of what it is and isn't said by the Google execs, the fact remains that social media data is incredibly powerful in so many ways. It's far, far more comprehensive in terms of measuring site/content authority, trust and relevance than traditional backlink tracking. There's just so much more information to work with.

Plus, web activity is moving more and more towards social media platforms. I know of loads of people who use the internet regularly for social media, but rarely ever browse websites. Everything they can find, whether that's news articles, videos, pictures or any other type of content, are all incorporated into the social media ecosystem.

This shift towards social media is only likely to increase in the future - especially with the decline of traditional desktop traffic as app-based mobiles and tablets take hold.

So the question is, with all the brain power Google has, have they really not found a single social media metric which they can successfully utilise in their ranking algorithms to help improve search engine results? I'm not so sure.

Given its potential value, it seems more likely that they would find something than not - however minor it may be.

Hi, Scott! Very interesting suff you wrote and I think you are right! Indeed, digital marketers have been proclaiming Google's demise for quite a long time. And I believe that social media and Facebook, in particular, can replace Google some day in terms of search. However, regarding your question, whether Google has added some kind of social media metric to complement its algorithm, - I'm afraid I don't know the answer to it. My guess is that if they did, they would definitely say so. But I believe that indirectly social media plays an important role in ranking.

SEO and SMM are like pizza and cheese - I love it! I hope you don't mind if I borrow that?! I think as with any kind of marketing approach we need to blend a number of different techniques - especially when it comes to distribution. It's fantastic to see this actually borne out in your data though. Perhaps one of the key things is that SMM commentators are talking about something that has a much bigger audience (and I mean audience and not target audience) because so many people are on social media.

I’ve met many digital marketers who are only focusing on SMM for site rankings. Given the fact that social media offers valuable insight to consumer behavior and helps in back-links, it has had minimal impact on organic traffic- at least from what I’ve observed. Thanks for pointing it out Alexandra!

Great Analysis About SEO and SMO. Search engine optimization is still important as an important aspect of securing long term organic traffic. SEO means link building.The traffic you will get through SEO is all organic traffic. SEO is a long term process and can be done with patience. When we optimize our website or webpages via SMO then we create a facebook fan page and create a Google+ page and join communities. After all you engage your target audience and share update with your target keywords along with url on different Social media channel like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Linkedin, Youtube, Digg, Flickr etc.

I always prefer social media marketing.It's a easy task for me.Still learning seo tricks to get top rank on google.Using social media i can target my potential customers within seconds.thanks for the ideas

Great article! I was wondering if anyone here had exp with jewelry kind of site? I get alot saves and likes on pinterset but visits are bad, so i was wondering what should i focus on more SMM or SEO, i mean the first page is dominated by difrent shops wich lets face it's hard to compete since they have milions to invest :)